The former Heidi Nelson—Claremont McKenna grad; Harvard Business grad; managing director at Goldman Sachs before taking a leave of absence for the current campaign; who in 2005 worked through a bout of depression, briefly in public, after moving to Texas from Washington, where she worked in the George W. Bush administration, because her husband had taken a job as the state’s solicitor general; who in 2011, on a panel discussion about work-life balance, stressed the importance of hiring live-in help because “it allows me to work 80 hours a week.”

Elsewhere in the footage, her husband recalls that she had her BlackBerry on her while in labor with their first child. “She was literally on her BlackBerry, working,” he says.

She says her dream as a girl was to work in Washington—which she did, until she didn’t—and that “I don’t cook” because her twice-weekly chore as a little girl was cleaning the house instead of preparing the meals, and she goes to contorted lengths to describe herself as “a traditional mom,” “the emotional center of the household,” “my most treasured role.”

She also at one point stresses to the camera that her husband is in fact not uncool: “If anyone were ever to ask, or wonder”—and who hasn’t?—“it is absolutely not true that I am cooler than Ted. Ted is absolutely the coolest person in our family, and I say that from the bottom of my heart.” She then adds, curiously, considering Cruz’s clothes: “Any bit of coolness that I may have added would be simply on the attire front.”

Thanks to his wife, you learn that Cruz likes games, movies, Chuck E. Cheese's and reading bedtime stories with a “very animated” voice.

Here, though, she grins, readying to tell the camera “what I really think.”

Into it she goes: “Our daughters Caroline and Catherine love their father. And Ted was first elected to the U.S. Senate when Catherine was barely 2 years old. And Caroline was 4. So all that Catherine has known is her Daddy being in the U.S. Senate. And she is very proud of that. She loves going to Washington, D.C., to visit him, and to see his office.”

You can just feel the but building.

“On the other hand,” she says, “our now-6-year-old was quite remembering of the times before he was a politician, before he was a U.S. Senator. And she will often ask, ‘Why do people want a picture with Daddy? What is Daddy doing? Why is Daddy in D.C.?’ There was a time when we were flying back from Washington, in the back of Southwestern Airlines, as we always do, and Catherine said very loudly, ‘Caroline, we should move to Washington, D.C., to be with Daddy all week.’ And Caroline said very clearly, right back, in a loud voice … ‘Catherine, we will not move to D.C., we are Texans, we will stay in Texas.’ One time, when he came home, they always run to the front door, and jump on him and want to play games, because that’s what they do together. And one time, they were running towards the front door, and Caroline shrieked, ‘There’s a guest in the house! There’s a guest in the house!’”

The literal point, in her words: “So even though they know he’s very much a part of our home, they do sometimes see him as a guest …”

She also says, using words that say a lot, at least to anybody who’s a parent, that Cruz “as a father to the girls” is “their friend” and “their buddy.”

“I know it’s hard, Mom.”

“That’s too personal, Ted,” she says. “I don’t want to tell that.”

Green jacket, gold earrings, this is Cruz’s mother, who comes off in the footage as a no-BS Irish-Italian. She’s the best character here.

Cruz, judging from his voice, is standing behind the camera.

“Well, I want to tell that,” he cajoles, “and you’re the best person to tell that.”

“Well,” Eleanor Darragh, 81, says back at him, “there’s some very personal details that I don’t want to go into.”

It’s difficult to determine what more Cruz wants from her, or why—you can’t hear a question—but he does want more.

Darragh had grown up in Wilmington, Delaware, with a father who drank too much and didn’t think daughters should go to college—but had gone to Houston’s Rice University, and graduated in 1956, with a math degree, before going to work as a computer programmer at a Shell research lab. A strong-willed, careerist woman more than 50 years ago, she at one point in the footage delivers bluntly to the camera the reason she never learned to type: “I didn’t know how to type, and I didn’t want to learn how to type, because I didn’t want somebody asking me to type letters for them. … So if someone asked me to type a letter, I’d say, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t type a letter. I don’t know how to type. You’ll have to get someone else to do it. A secretary. I’m not a secretary. I’m a programmer.’” Cruz’s wife doesn’t cook; his mother doesn’t type.

She had been married before, Cruz’s mother, and had a baby boy named Michael—who died in his sleep in his crib. The grief had wrenched apart her marriage. Cruz mentions this in his book, not in this video, and his mother doesn’t offer this back story, either—but knowing it makes watching her talk about her difficult, on-and-off second marriage to Cruz’s father all the more uncomfortable. She had married Rafael Cruz, a Cuban who had fled to Texas, and in 1970, in Canada, where they were working in the oil and gas business in Calgary, she had given birth to their son—Rafael Edward Cruz, who later, as a teen, decided to call himself Ted.

In the footage, she already had touched on this, not oversharing but saying matter-of-factly: “Ted’s dad left us in Canada. It was a very painful time for me. I was very angry and I was very hurt. But I continued working at the company that we had founded and put Ted in day care and had a nanny that would come in who would stay with him. … I was very determined to have Ted have a father. To me that was important. I didn’t want to be a single mother. I felt that his having a father was the most important goal in my life.”

“I was really a drunk,” Cruz’s father says in a different moment.

They would get back together, Cruz’s parents, but ultimately would divorce once their talented, promising son went out on his own, off to Princeton.

Now, pushed by her son to say more, she starts talking again.

“When Ted was 3 …”

Cruz cuts her off.

“Look at me,” he says to his mother, clear and curt, before perhaps realizing the need for a softer tone. “I know, I know,” he says. “I know it’s hard, Mom. I, I …”

“OK,” she says, her facial expression a cross between exasperation and resignation. “I’m not used to this at all.”

Nobody’s prop, an extra in nobody’s show, but still a mother, she relents: “When Ted was 3, Rafael left and went to Houston …” When her husband “became a Christian,” she says, she “was skeptical. So I was on edge most of the time … just waiting for him to fail, waiting for him to do something wrong. Because I didn’t really believe that he had changed. But it was important enough for me for Ted to have a father that I was willing to go along with it to see if we could not make a go of it. And it was a full three years after we moved to Houston that I hit bottom, emotionally, and was able to accept the Lord myself. And that changed my life …”

Is that—that last part—the message that might show up in a Cruz ad?

“Together scene real quick,” the cameraman says, “and let’s move on.”

“Yep,” Cruz says.

He emerges from behind the camera and slides onto the couch next to his mother. She sighs and smiles, sort of. “You’ve got to train me, I’m sorry,” she says.

Cruz then says his mother “is an incredible prayer warrior” and that “not a day goes by that my Mom is not lifting me up in prayer.”

“That’s right,” she concurs.

“For hours,” Cruz says, pausing, “at a time.”

At which point Eleanor Darragh just can’t help herself. The mother of this rising conservative presidential candidate looks at the ceiling and makes a face that can only be interpreted as saying one thing. No.